


Cracks on the Pavement

by orphan_account



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: M/M, Pre-Canon, though probably not very accurate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-28
Updated: 2012-09-28
Packaged: 2017-11-15 04:58:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/523389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Under extenuating circumstances (the zombie apocalypse, Third Wheel Zack, and River Phoenix), the question of marriage is considered without due seriousness. A love story told inappropriately in three tenses and tones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cracks on the Pavement

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "[Only Love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26X6SRqJ_VU)" by Kula Shaker.

Jack decides to fall in love with Eugene over a cup of coffee. It isn’t a particularly good cup, and it’s terrible coffee contained within, but Eugene presses a repurposed food tin full of it into Jack’s hands and sits down next to him while he coughs like he’s got the grey.

“Just think of it as chicken soup flavored coffee,” Eugene says. “It’ll fix you right up.”

Jack wants to say that it’s not the consistency of soup (it’s inexplicably _thicker_ ) and it’s definitely not got the taste of chicken which he knows for a fact despite his recent flirtations with vegetarianism. All he manages is a wheeze, though. Eugene makes sympathetic sounds.

Then he pats Jack on the back.

While Zack keeps his distance, after threatening Jack with the pointy end of his garden fork immediately after he coughs for the first time, Eugene takes his flu at face value, puts his hand on Jack’s back and pats.

It’s then that Jack realizes and says, “I love you,” but with his mouth full of coffee--which is foul, but also the only source of hydration within their immediate vicinity that wouldn’t strike Jack down with a bout of ebola--Jack only manages to mumble incoherently and stain the front of his shirt brown.

 

It started as early as the Terminator incident (“We’re not calling it the Terminator incident,” Eugene said). Jack found himself ineffably charmed by the flush of Eugene’s cheeks and the way his jaws clamped down against a smile when he said, “No, you’re mistaken,” in response to Jack’s, “Did you _really_ say Come With Me If You Want To Live.”

Not one to keep things of impropriety to himself, Jack would have gamely said exactly what Eugene’s facial area made his post-nap self feel (good and warm and full of cuddles, specifically) had he not come across his very first de-reanimated zom just then.

The hollering that ensued distracted him from any prolonged thoughts about his savior’s face, and for the time being, that was that.

 

“I could marry that man,” Jack says, expression a decent cross between charmed and forlorn. Zack looks up on his way out of the probably abandoned barn they’re currently looting several stacks of firewood from and tightens his grip on the garden fork he’s yet to release in Jack’s (who, for the record, was feeling much better and not at all in the mood for human brains) presence.

If Zack bothered shifting his suspicious gaze away from Jack to a spot in his periphery, he would see Eugene sidling away from a peckish bird that was attacking a crumb of pickled beet that had dropped from a half-full tin Eugene was covering up for dinner. Jack, who is looking at that exact spot, sees a gentle, woodland critter loving man who shares his sparse rations with the beaked and needy--who Jack was totally going to marry as soon as the institution of marriage came back into being.

“Soon,” Jack says absently

Zack, garden fork brandished, inches away slowly.

 

Then it was the platonic leaning, or the ceaseless cuddling as Zack insisted on calling it. Its origins could be traced as far back as the holy union of Jack and W.G. the bat, and the celebratory hugs Jack passed around upon picking it up from a high school rec room’s equipment cabinet. Zack balked and Eugene hugged him back.

It became a thing. Jack kept W.G. in his left hand and looped his free arm through Eugene’s when they walked, which was more and more often as they learned new ways to not present themselves as attractive items on a zombie gourmet dinner menu. Eugene started holding his arm out for Jack in anticipation at about the same time he started narrating their adventures in his best fake Ira Glass voice to distract them all from the onsetting acceptance that this wasn’t a badly timed and very comprehensive Halloween prank.

At about the same time, Jack started to think Eugene’s mouth would be a good place to put his mouth. He would have been very forward about putting this notion into motion at that very time had Eugene ever, for even one second, paused for breath.

Instead, the motion is put on hold while Jack allowed himself to be distracted from the zombie apocalypse on a day by day basis by, “Today on This Zombie Life--.”

 

The problem with Jack’s plan is not his determination, nor is it a lack of trying. It’s that Eugene says, “Oh, no thank you,” when Jack’s sinuses finally clear up enough for him to say, coherently, “Marry me.”

Eugene goes back to fortifying the doors of their shelter for the night. Jack is too confused to be hurt, or even concerned.

While Jack isn’t lacking in the modesty department, he also knows he isn’t exactly lacking in the cute-as-fudge department, either. After several actual months in his company, Eugene should know both these things by now and when Jack takes that into consideration, _no thank you_ makes no sense.

Jack sits down on a rock and frowns.

 

The thirteenth or fourteenth installment of This Zombie Life took a turn for the heart-wrenching when Zack found a power cord matching his cell and played a weeks-old message from someone whose voice is soft, panicked and familiar in a way that made Zack choke up over the syllables of their name.

Then it was Zack, sobbing and saying, “ _Talk_ , damn you. Talk and don’t listen to me. Don’t you fucking listen--.”

Eugene listened, but only to the demand. He talked about his parents in vague, abstract terms, and made the appropriate expressions of loss when he said he thinks about never seeing them again. He talked about Canada and called it a home he misses, which sounded more genuine and true than anything he’d said about family. He talked about his sleazy ex, his stint with his college track and field team, and anything else he could think of about the past until Zack regained some modicum of composure.

Afterwards, Jack peeled away to the front aisles of the convenience store they’d taken shelter in. As he filled a bag with non-perishable foodstuffs, he only barely resisted the urge to sit right down on the floor and cry--in part for Zack’s lost of a sister, daughter, mother, but mostly for the cracks starting to show through Eugene’s cheer and the wrinkles appearing at his temples.

Before they left the next morning, Jack pulled Eugene aside and hugged him until neither of them could breathe.

 

Jack has sustained a three-day pout by the time Eugene realizes this isn’t grief over Zack’s untimely departure from their punchy band of survivalists (and the mortal plane). After Eugene asks, Jack resists for an hour longer before answering with his own question:

“Why not?”

Eugene, very clearly, does not understand.

“Why won’t you marry me?” Jack asks, knowing well and completely ignoring just how pitiful it sounds.

After a moment, Eugene starts walking again. He doesn’t hold an arm out for Jack.

 

They won’t talk about it again until days after Eugene’s operation. Jack will be red-eyed and sniffling while Dr Myers leaves them with instructions for Eugene’s physical therapy. Ten days will have passed in anger, sullen and quiet and more than somewhat awkward, and another five in tears and blood and appropriate amounts of melodrama.

Then Eugene will say, as soon as he’s able, “I had a plan.”

Jack might not hear him through the deafening sound of his own worry.

“It was supposed to be over a warm dinner and this illegal copy of of _Stand By Me_ on my flash drive.”

Jack’s breath will hitch as he rubs his hands against his eyes. “What?”

“Wooing you, I mean,” Eugene will say after grimacing at a sudden lance of phantom pain. “You’re a romantic. I had a plan.”

Jack will say _what_ again, but come without needing too much explanation to the realization that through the lense of idolatry he had failed to recognize Eugene as a solidly stubborn man who would never think once about deviating from a plan--who would, in fact, react quite badly and bizarrely to any unforeseen complications to said plan (for example, abrupt proposals of marriage). He’ll run out of the med tent and promise favors to everyone in Abel until he can borrow a microwave, a netbook, and a long enough length of extension cables to power both.

Then, over eggless eggs and River Phoenix, Eugene finally decides to reciprocate.


End file.
